The Ins and Outs of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR)

The Ins and Outs of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR)

Cloud DROutages are inevitable. As we’ve seen over the past few years, every major cloud vendor’s experienced at least one, and we can expect that they will again at some point in the future. As cloud consumers, we need to be able to use the cloud’s building blocks and unlimited resources (at least, in theory), and create service robustness and high availability. Yet, important issues, like SLAs, remain unclear when it comes to consuming resources and services from IaaS vendors.Today, more than ever, online software service vendors, have a lot to lose when their services suffer from performance degradation. They could lose significant amounts of revenue as a result of actual outages as well as diminished user loyalty. In this article, I will share baseline perceptions and methods of cloud-based DR.

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Amazon Outage: Is it a Story of a Conspiracy? – Chapter 2

In April 2011, when Amazon’s cloud s east region failed. I posted the first chapter of theAmazon Cloud Outage Conspiracy – it was already very clear that the cloud will fail again and here it is… Chapter 2

Let’s first try to understand Amazon’s explanation for this outage.

“At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high voltage Utility power distribution system. Two Utility substations that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the entire Availability Zone to fail over to generator power. All EC2 instances and EBS volumes successfully transferred to back-up generator power.”

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The Inevitable Outage of the Cloud

Cloud Disaster Recovery DilbertTraditionally delivering high availability often meant replicating everything. However, today with the option of going to the cloud we can say that providing two of everything is costly. High availability should be planned and achieved at several different levels: including the software, the data center and the geographic redundancy. According to a recent study the cost of a data center outage ranges from a minimum cost of $38,969 to a maximum of $1,017,746 per organization, with an overall average cost of $505,502 per incident.

1 – Total cost of partial and complete outages can be a significant expense for organizations.

2 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the duration of the outage.

3 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the size of the data center

4 – Certain causes of the outage are more expensive than others.  Specifically, IT equipment failure is the most expensive root cause.  Accidental/human error is least expensive.

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